All the colours of the rainbow

Along the New Westminster Quay, the gardeners are always at work. They take pride in creating new arrangements, experimenting with new arrangements of plants both familiar and exotic. Every time we visit, we discover new delights. This last Saturday was no exception.

Here's a sampler:


Showy. Double tulips. These yellows were so bright that the camera could only capture them in the shade.


Shy and retiring. Wood violets. I love these tiny beauties.


Fritillary. Or Snake's Head. Or Checkered Lily, if you prefer. Look at this full size; the pattern looks artificial. It isn't.


Little stars under the shade of the shrubbery. I don't know what they are.


The only name I can find for this is "Hairy Purple Rock Flower". I'm sure that's not the official name, but I'll go with that for now. They really are hairy!


Another tulip, triple. Pink, white and ... green?


Fawn lily. Another of my favourites. So graceful!


Almost hidden among its leaves, a dwarf iris boasts a deep purple-black, velvety lip on the palest of pale green petals.

And for the just plain odd, the multi-coloured brassicas that have been with us all winter, ...

Beginning of April.

... are flowering. In bright yellow.

End of April.

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Cruising Down the River ...

... on a Saturday afternoon ...

Bridges over the Fraser River: the Patullo and the SkyTrain bridge.

Tugboat, detail

Same tugboat; old paint, old rust.

Afternoon stroll

Ambling upriver.

New Westminster Quay, in the sunshine.
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Blanket on a stick

Every so often, I disover that I've been looking at something for a long time, but never really seeing it. Cattails, for example. They're those tall fluffy stalks in the swamp that the redwing blackbirds perch on just until I get the camera focused. And that denote a place too wet to walk without boots. That's it.

Blind as a bat.

Six weeks ago, on The Marvelous in Nature, Seabrooke wrote about Shy Cosmet moth larvae that spend the winter cosily snuggled inside a cattail head. She had brought a couple home and shredded them into a tub. Sure enough, she found a larva.

According to BugGuide, the Shy Cosmet doesn't live here on the West Coast, but the moths are smart; cattail fluff does make wonderful insulation. I promised myself to see if anything was taking advantage of it in our marshes.

Pillows of fluff.

I brought home a cattail head the next time I found one I could reach. Seabrooke (and Gerry Wykes) write that these larvae make a net of fine threads around the head, so that when it blows open, the seeds and fluff stay put, making a lumpy "cotton candy" blob. I forgot all that, and picked a nice, neat head that wouldn't fall apart in the car.

At home, I propped it in a bottle on the table and left it for later. I glanced that way after a while, and saw a head poke out, briefly. Aha! It's alive!

I put the cattail in a Tupperware dish and cracked it open, gingerly. Nothing but packed fluff. I pinched a bit and pulled.

Mistake. The fluff exploded. Fine, baby-hair-fine, downy fibers flew all over my desk, over my keyboard, in the air around my head, in my hair, in my nose. I sneezed. I had to clean out the air intake on the computer, and dust off the screen.

Fluff. With tiny seeds; that's what the larvae eat.

I went at the rest more cautiously, holding the bowl inside a large plastic bag, which was soon filled with fluff. When I took my hands out, more fluff came with it. I pulled out the bowl, carefully, sealed the bag and left that for later.

With a sheet of glass over the bowl, I could look for larvae safely. And there were dozens, all very active, about 3 or 4 mm. long.


These look very much like the one Seabrooke found. And like Gerry's handful. Maybe the Shy Cosmet has found its way out here, after all.

I didn't know what to do with the larvae after I'd looked at them. I put most of them back in the fluff, but kept a few to look at later; they went outside, with a tight lid on the container. Life got busy around then, and I forgot about the bugs.

All that fluff; what to do with it? Maybe the birds would like it for insulating nests. An old, broken-down birdhouse hangs on the wall; the juncos used to use it as a perch and feeder until the snowstorm a year ago turned it upside-down, but since then, it has been empty. It would be dry and accessible. I stuffed it full of fluff, packing it in through the door.

This last Friday, a bushtit was collecting cattail fluff. For a baby blanket, I hope.

Fuzzy photo; I was rushing to get it before she left.

I went out tonight and brought in the dish of left-over fluff and larvae. Three of them are still there, very much alive. There aren't too many seeds left, though; tomorrow I'll give them a pinch of stuff from the bird house.

Come to think of it, the bird house is probably packed tight with larvae.
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Gimme an "e"

Crow's nest, at our local Chapters store:

I think that's a pigeon's tail poking out from the bottom piece of the "r".
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Zip. Buzz. Hum.

At the entrance to the Reifel Island bird sanctuary, there is a house and lawn to the left, possibly a caretaker's cottage. Shrubbery and a rail fence hides it from the public areas, but just at the corner of the storefront, a 2-metre length of bare rail gives a glimpse of the lawn and the water beyond.

When we arrived, a photographer was set up with his tripod there, and we went over to see what he was aiming at. Hanging just inside the fence is a hummingbird feeder; a pair of birds were taking turns at it.

I couldn't decide which photos were the best, so I'm posting half a dozen.

Somebody had attached a few branches to the bottom of the feeder, to be used as perches.

Blurry. Those wings move at up to about 80 beats per second. The camera just can't keep up.

This one is red (with green splotches) all over.

Perched. Green shoulders. The collar, or gorget, looks black at this angle.

White belly on this one.

Look at those wings go!

I assumed this was a mated pair, and tried to see if I could identify their sexes. The more I looked, the more confused I got.

Here are a couple of descriptions; you may have better luck than I did.

From Hummingbird Pictures Guide:

The male is rufous (brownish red) on all sides with a white breast and bright orange-red gorget(throat). The female rufous hummingbird is green above, rufous on the sides, white beneath, and has orange-red spots on the throat patch ... with rufous coloring at the base of its outer tail feathers, black in the middle, and white at the tip.

From hummingbirds.net:

Adult male: Non-iridescent rufous crown, tail, and sides; back may be rufous, green , or some of each; bright orange-red gorget, white breast....
Adult female: Green back and crown, white breast, streaked throat, rufous sides and base of tail feathers, white tips on outer tail feathers.

If this is a mated pair, they probably have a walnut-sized nest somewhere in the trees over the house,

"built with moss, lined with plant down, covered on the outside with lichen and bark, and held together with spider webbing." From Bird Web.

Hard to imagine. When I was a kid, a hummingbird got inside the wood shed, and was caught in a spider web. Mom freed it, but without restraining it herself, first. The panicked bird escaped, flying straight through the open door into the house. I remember Mom and Dad chasing it around from window to window, trying to throw a kitchen towel over it to hold it down. It took a long time.

When they finally caught it, Mom held it in her hand a minute to let it calm down, then took it to the back porch and released it.

I wonder, now, if the poor bird was just trying to harvest spider web for a nest.
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Interlude: Books, read and unread.

My immune system has been overpowered once more; I've been felled by a meme.

Blame this one on Christopher, at Catalogue of Organisms. I'll let him explain it:

Supposedly, this is a list of the 106 top books that people have lying around at home because they think they should read them sometime but have never got around to reading. Needless to say, it's a list that is heavy on the "classics" and other pretentious wank. As John Wilkins did, I've bolded the books that I've read, and italicised the ones that I've started reading but never finished.

And I will follow suit. Bold, I've read. Italicised, I've started on.

• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
• Anna Karenina
• Crime and Punishment - I read this in Spanish when my Spanish was iffy at best. All I can remember of it is struggling with the dictionary.
  
• Catch-22
• One Hundred Years of Solitude
• Wuthering Heights
  
• The Silmarillion
  
• Life of Pi : a novel
• The Name of the Rose
• Don Quixote - Read this one in Spanish. Started it in English, and gave up. It didn't "sound" right.
  
• Moby Dick
• Ulysses
  
• Madame Bovary
  
• The Odyssey In a kid's version, long ago, in English. In Spanish as an adult.
  
• Pride and Prejudice
  
• Jane Eyre
• The Tale of Two Cities - I read this first when I was 12, and re-read it several times around that time. Much later, I started on it again, found it too artificially dramatic, and gave up.
  
• The Brothers Karamazov - In Spanish, because it was required reading for my college Lit. class. Otherwise, I think I would have dropped it half-way.
  
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
• War and Peace - I read maybe the first three or four pages. Looked at the thickness of the book, imagined another 400 pages like the first, and put the book away.
  
• Vanity Fair
• The Time Traveler’s Wife
  
• The Iliad
  
• Emma
  
• The Blind Assassin
  
• The Kite Runner
• Mrs. Dalloway
• Great Expectations - My son loved this, so I read it. I was disappointed.
  
• American Gods
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
• Atlas Shrugged
• Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
• Memoirs of a Geisha
• Middlesex
• Quicksilver
• Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
• The Canterbury tales - I read bits and pieces. The tale of the Wife of Bath, several times.
  
• The Historian : a novel
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Love in the Time of Cholera
• Brave New World - Twice.
  
• The Fountainhead
• Foucault’s Pendulum
• Middlemarch
• Frankenstein
• The Count of Monte Cristo
• Dracula
• A Clockwork Orange
• Anansi Boys
• The Once and Future King - I think it's still on my shelves, unread.
  
• The Grapes of Wrath
• The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
• 1984 - Several times.
  
• Angels & Demons
• The Inferno - Attempted it several times, always got sidetracked.
  
• The Satanic Verses
• Sense and Sensibility - It seems that I've read all the Jane Austens, some twice.
  
• The Picture of Dorian Gray - English and Spanish. Wilde, writing in English, produced prose that translates as if it were meant for Spanish. Unusual, that.
  
• Mansfield Park
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
• To the Lighthouse
• Tess of the D’Urbervilles
• Oliver Twist
• Gulliver’s Travels - Another I've read several times.
  
• Les Misérables
• The Corrections
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
• Dune - I always meant to re-read this, but never have. Yet. I followed up with Dune Messiah, was disappointed, and never read any of the others.
  
• The Prince
• The Sound and the Fury
• Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
• The God of Small Things
• A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
• Cryptonomicon
• Neverwhere
• A Confederacy of Dunces
• A Short History of Nearly Everything
• Dubliners
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• Beloved
• Slaughterhouse-five - I started this at a bad time, couldn't finish it. I should look it up again.
• The Scarlet Letter
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves
  
• The Mists of Avalon
• Oryx and Crake : a novel
• Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
• Cloud Atlas
• The Confusion
• Lolita
• Persuasion
  
• Northanger Abbey
  
• The Catcher in the Rye
  
• On the Road
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame
• Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
• The Aeneid - Kid's version, in English, regular version, in Spanish.
  
• Watership Down - Bits and pieces.
• Gravity’s Rainbow
• The Hobbit - What Christopher says explains some of the difficulties I have with Hobbit.

  "Problem is, Tolkein started on The Hobbit as a story for his kids before he realised the possibility of linking it into his "Elven lore" compositions. As a result, The Hobbit doesn't know whether it's supposed to be a light children's story or a serious piece of pseudo-mythology, and there's definite signs of strain."

  I loved the Lord of the Rings series, and re-read the whole series about once a year for a long time. I recently bought a new set; my old one was in tatters held together with duct tape.
  
• In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
• White Teeth
• Treasure Island - That, and Kidnapped, were frequent re-reads for a while.
  
• David Copperfield
  
• The Three Musketeers - In Spanish. Quite a lot of the vocabulary was still unfamiliar to me at the time; it added to the romance. Long ago and far away, it seemed. Good escape literature.

Some of the books on this list, I have never heard of. They would not qualify as books I "have lying around at home because (I) think (I) should read them sometime but have never got around to reading."

I do have others that would fit, though. A good shelf full. Someday, I'll sit down and read them. Or take them to my favourite second-hand book store and exchange them for ones that I will read.

No, I haven't seen any on screen.
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Mother Goose, and maybe Father, too.

The Reifel Island bird sanctuary is a maze of waterways and lagoons, tide flats, islets and hummocks, criss-crossed by narrow spits and dikes for human visitors; we walked for 3 hours on Tuesday without covering half of it.

One of the larger lagoons. Observation tower visible on far side.

At intervals, we pass observation posts; a tower or two, a few raised platforms, three or four blinds, the odd bench for resting weary legs.

On one of the platforms, a goose dozed, standing one-legged on the railing. (Great sense of balance!)


At the far end of the platform, I put a handful of the bird seed we had picked up at the Reifel entrance. The goose woke immediately, turned and walked over to check it out ...



... hissing as he (or she; they look alike) came towards me; "Out of my way, and don't touch that food! It's mine!"

Head-on like that, he looks different; round and fat. And menacing.

I didn't move away, but he wasn't going to miss out on the handout. He came right up within arm's reach.

Goose feet, and the top of his head, too close to focus.

Eating. See the seeds in his bill?

We went on our way. On several of the islets, geese were sitting on their nests.




These don't seem to be all that well protected, but there is no human access to the islets; no boats on the water, no paths leading to them. They're probably too big to have to worry about eagles, which would be a threat to smaller birds.

From the U. of Michigan "Animal Diversity Web", I learn;

Female Canada geese pick nesting sites that are isolated but have good visibility. This allows them to readily see danger approaching and to be difficult to get at. The nesting area also must have open water with low banks so they can have access to water plants and places to get into or out of the water.

They sit on the nest for 3 to 4 weeks, so within a month the goslings will be on the water. At the entrance they told us that the sandhill cranes are nesting, too. Their incubation period is just slightly longer, but under 5 weeks. We must come back next month!
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Bigfoot. Really.

The first coot I ever saw was at Reifel Island; since then, every time I've been there, I've been watching for them. I count myself fortunate to see even one. Tuesday afternoon, we found dozens.

Coot, waiting for us beside the parking lot.

"Crazy as a coot," they say. And often justify the saying by telling of its voice, squeaks or metallic scraping noises, clicks, sometimes a bottle cork sound, sometimes a cough, always unmusical. (sound file of a metallic call here). Others reference its swimming style; not gliding, but bouncing along, bobbing its head with the effort. Or watch its awkward attempts at take-off. Because its wings are short, it needs to get up a good speed to lift off, so it runs over the surface of the water, splashing and squawking for up to 100 feet.

Photo from Wikipedia

I think it's simpler than that; just look at the bird!


An odd, misshapen body. Too short, as if it were half a bird, lopped off before the tail. A black neck-warmer pulled up like a hood over the eyes. Red eyes. Green legs with an orange garter, feet in a dead-meat greyish blue. The stark white bill is too long for the face, so it rises to the forehead, pinned on with a coloured button at the top.


The "button", or frontal shield, on this coot is reddish-brown; the next one has a yellow border on its shield.

And the feet:


Huge, floppy feet, three sizes too big for the little bird. How it manages to walk without tripping over its own toes is a mystery.

Watch it dive:

Big feet out at right angles; in the water, they make good paddles.

Underwater now, but the feet still at the surface. It makes quite a "hole" in the water as it goes down.

The weirdest thing about the coot's dive is the way it surfaces. Sometimes it pops up like any normal diving duck, but often it comes up the way it went down; head down, tail up. It looks like a video in reverse.

Crazy.

Coot and Greater Scaup.

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Sleepy afternoon, with ducks

We're getting some spring weather at last; yesterday was bright and sunshiny, but with a cold, brisk wind. We went to Reifel Island bird sanctuary, where the trees and bush would shelter us somewhat.

This was the first time that I can remember going on a weekday. The paths were almost deserted, except for a few people mainly sitting or squatting quietly behind their tripods and long lenses. And the birds! I have never seen so many, nor so many different kinds on one visit as we did yesterday. I think that on weekends, many must be hiding from the crowds.

We have far too many photos for one blog post, so I'll do this in easy stages. Today, the dabbling ducks.

Mallards, of course:


(Added: well, half mallards, anyhow. Hugh says, in the comments, that the male is a mallard/pintail cross. He has photos of the same bird on his blog.)

In contrast to their usual weekend behaviour, when they mob us, demanding handouts, yesterday they sat calmly on the water, gossiping among themselves.

Mixing with them were coots (more on these, later), wigeons, pintails, Canada geese, a few northern shovelers, and, I think, a few greater scaup.

Wigeon, male

Pintail. Isn't he handsome? And he knows it.

Mallard, enjoying a joke

More mallards

Female wigeon? Sometimes it's quite hard to distinguish between them, especially with the mallard propensity for cross-breeding.

Pintail

Mallard, up-ended

It was all very restful; the sun on our backs, the music overhead (red-winged blackbirds, song sparrows, house finch, swallows, and something else, never quite identifiable), the contented quacking and croaking from the waterways, even the occasional photographer; "Stand here," several told me, "the light is right."

A deceptive peace. We stopped to photograph a party of coots, and I tempted them with bird seed. A few mallards came over to investigate. And one male objected to the presence of the second, too close to his mate, it seems. He attacked, and the other fought back. It wasn't just the usual irritable pecking at the underdog; this was a real battle, on water, then on land, behind us, in front of us, then back in the water again, rushing at each other, flailing and squawking angrily.

After a few minutes of this, I remembered my camera. Here they are:






Finally it ended. One mallard left, with the other pursuing for a few metres, then returning victorious to his mate. The neighbourly chatter resumed. All was well.
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Giant snail discovered in New Westminster

Never-before-seen yellow-lipped snail:


Unfortunately, this unique specimen was quickly destroyed by a party of youngsters.


Back to more mundane beasties tomorrow.
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Tea Party

"Say when!"

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And would you call it a swarm of snails?

Out for a quick walk, we passed three large trees in front of a townhouse complex. They will be covered in pink or white blooms soon, but for now, they're just barren branches. We were surprised to see several snails climbing the first one; there's nothing to eat up there yet.

The next tree had more. Quite a few more; one every foot or so, bottom to top, all around the trunk. A snail traffic jam.

They came in a sampler of colours and patterns; yellow, brown, single-, triple- or un-striped, smooth, ridged. We went wild, taking photos of all within reach. Here are the main types:


1. Greenish-yellow, one narrow black stripe per loop.


2. Highly ridged brown, very faintly striped.


3. Pale, almost transparent brown, darkening towards the centre. Smooth. No striping.


4. Another smooth brown one, very faintly striped.


5. Brown, black and reddish stripes, three per loop, on a yellow base. All of these were highly pitted, as if they had attracted attention by birds too small to break through.

These couldn't be all the same species. Could they? But if not, why were they swarming? I spent the evening tonight reading descriptions of local snails and looking at photos.

I found a Guide to the Snails of the TWU Campus, which is just a few miles east of here. From there, I selected a few possibles: Monadenia fidelis, for the striped snails, Haplotrema vancouverense for the pale brown one, Cryptomastix germana for the ridged brown one. But when I Googled these separately, I ran into problems. None of these quite matched up; most Monadenia photos had no stripes, and they were reddish rather than yellow. Cryptomastix was a dwarf species. Haplotrema always had a pale cream body; I already had a photo of the pale brown snail and its body was blackish.

Back to the drawing board. I Googled all the snails on the TWU site. Aha! Cepaea nemoralis, the grove snail, fitted, even though the TWU photo didn't. Biopix gave me a whole page of photos, and cleared up most of the mystery.

Cepaea is an extremely variable species. Wikipedia says,

Apart from the band at the lip of the shell, grove snails are highly polymorphic in their shell colour and banding. They range from almost white, through yellow and pink to dark brown, with a range of light and dark bandings. The bandings vary both in colour and number (but never more than five bands).

One problem remained. The Royal BC Museum write-up describes the body:

The body of this snail is cream coloured/pale brown, becoming darker towards the head and on the tentacles.

None of the snails on the trees was going anywhere; not a body, not even a tentacle was visible. But I had photographed a couple of these snails before, nicely extended.




See the problem? Dark brown body on one, blue-black on the other. Not cream coloured. Not even close.

More Googling. (What did we ever do without Google?) Photo # 13 on the BioPix page is of a Cepaea (They call it the Brown-Lipped Snail rather than grove snail, but a few colour morphs have a white lip. Naturally.) with a brown shell, but a black body. Problem solved.

From now on, it will be hard to convince me that any snail I see, no matter what colour, pattern, or size, is anything but Cepaea. They're all grove snails. The whole kit and caboodle.

Two more questions remain. There were snails on the first tree, many on the second. And on the third in the row, the same type of tree, not a single snail. Why?

And, in Photo # 1, above, what is that pile of stuff beside the shell? Snail poop?
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Ambush

I babysat all afternoon, and I'm tired. Very. I'm going off to bed.

First, though, here's a spider, found on a daffodil my granddaughter was asking permission to cut. She changed her mind.


A closer view; look at the size of those pedipalps!


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Green heads and grey

Spring has come to Cougar Creek, and the beavers have been busy, building habitat. We went down to take a look at the progress.

Here is the map from last March:


In that light green oval, the little pond they had started is now deeper and wider, no longer just a widening in the creek.


They are working on a homestead dam at the outlet, and have been enthusiastically felling trees up and down the creek. At the entrance to the main ponds, a stack of building materials provided a sunning spot for a large turtle. He posed nicely for us, raising his head to display the yellow striped chin.


The resident heron was not so co-operative.


After half a dozen photos of the branches, with a blurry grey mass behind, I finally managed to focus.

So he up and left.


He's camera shy.


This bathing mallard wasn't.


Nor was the widgeon.

The mergansers have gone, so has the cormorant. But the mallards are parading up and down the ponds, in pairs.




And over on the far side, -- oh, joy! -- a new, younger heron was fishing. And not in the least shy.

Heron and widgeon

Stalking, one slow step at a time

Gotcha!

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Deltaport, before Gateway

And I am hoping there are no "After Gateway" photos in our future.

Bracketing the main part of the Tsawwassen First Nations Reserve, two causeways stretch out several kilometres into the Strait of Georgia. They function, although that was not the intent of the builders, as breakwaters, creating a calm bay where assorted waterbirds rest and feed.


This was taken from the Deltaport causeway, looking south towards the ferry landing and the San Juan islands in the distance. Maybe a map will help.




Looking northwest; the water is a bit rougher. The Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary is on that spit of flat land. Beyond, the North Shore mountains and the Sunshine Coast.


Looking inland, to the southeast; the Tsawwassen Reserve is directly ahead. It's midafternoon, on a bright day; most of the ducks are probably dabbling in the shade along the waterways at Reifel. But there are still a few out in the open, dotted here and there across the bay.

More ducks, of assorted varieties.

On the Deltaport causeway itself, the scene changes.


Three wide lanes of train tracks, with a highway for trucks alongside. Gravel, rust, metal, oil. Assorted chunks of rusted iron. A smell of diesel and dust.

There's a certain romance about trains, something that sings of distance and strength, that recalls lonely whistles in the night, that chants a clackety-clack-clack poem made of names of places: "Kicking Horse Pass and Cranbrook and Golden, Crowsnest, Kelowna, Lethbridge and Skagway, North to the Yukon, South to Vancouver, the Canyon and Whistler, Day-train to Squamish."

Canada's history is interlaced with tales of the railway; it's what opened up the west and tied the country together. Who has not seen the photos of the Last Spike, or heard of the blood, sweat and dynamite that carved the route through the Fraser Canyon?

Switch.

Regrettably, we have been turning to trucks, which are more wasteful of energy and manpower, need more support along the way (gas stations, eateries, tire shops ...). The trains have been cutting routes, trimming schedules, as more and more trucks clog our highways, even in the face of rising gas prices and future shortages.

Evergreen. One wishes.

At the port itself, tall metal beasts wait for their prey; ships bearing goods for our markets, begging for BC's wood, fish and minerals.




I wonder: do we need, really need, all the goods these ships bring? Could we learn to use our local products, decrease our reliance on trucks, boats, trains? Is it wise to keep pumping our waste products into the air we have to breathe, the water our fish and birds live in and on, the fields where we grow our vegetables?

And more: do we really need to expand our highways, buy ever increasing quantities of "stuff"; cheap plastics for our dollar stores, clothes to replace last season's barely-worn but out of style outfits, exotic foods to tease our jaded taste buds, the latest item being hawked on TV, things brighter, shinier, saltier, sweeter, lighter, stronger, faster, softer, warmer, cooler than the ones that were good enough last year?

At the end of the day, waves lap on the rocks. A man throws sticks for a couple of dogs. The sunshine, lower in the sky now, dazzles us. In the distance, a bird surfaces, then dives again.


Isn't this enough?
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Water bear! (repost) Part II

This is a repost from my previous blog, from November, 20006, the second of 2 parts. First part here.

I first read about water bears, or tardigrades, a year ago, in "Nature in Miniature" by Richard Headstrom. (1968) Unfortunately, he misled me: he said that "the only way to find it is to add a little water to the sediment of a rain gutter or the mud from a pond and examine it with a microscope." So I've been looking all along in the wrong places, and not realizing I could use a hand lens. I found it, finally, in moss, as I wrote a few days ago. (2006)

The water bear, probably so named (in 1773) because it looks somewhat like a miniature bear, is a tiny animal, barely growing to 1.2 mm. Enough to be seen with the naked eye in a good light, just. Add to that, that it is transparent, and the light has to be falling from the right angle. But still, well worth the look.

Basic body structure: 5 segments, 8 legs, each with tiny "claws" that look something like a mole's digging feet. Two eyes, small and almost invisible, even under a 60x microscope. A round mouth/snout like the business end of a nose-hair clipper. Not much else; it's a very simple animalcule.

They eat bits of detritus that they find in their placid amble; some are vegetarian, some meat-eaters. Some reproduce asexually, but not all. They live everywhere on earth, wherever they find water, fresh or salt.

And they are slow-moving. That's why they're called the "tardigrades", or "slow steppers". But determined enough to travel a fair distance nontheless. Stubborn little beasties.

More than stubborn: Headstrom calls it "one of the toughest animals we may ever expect to find."

They need water to be active. But give them a spell of dry weather, and they shrivel up into a "grain of powder". (It doesn't matter what stage of life they are at, either; they go into cryptobiosis, "hidden life" at almost any stage.) (Added, 2008) Leave them that way for years. Wet them down and wait a few hours, and they swell up and walk off as if nothing had happened.

Freeze them. No problem. They live happily in Antartica. They can survive down to -272 degrees Celsius. Try that yourself!

Boil them. Not to worry; boiling water only reaches 100 degrees C; the water bear can tolerate 150.

Deprive them of oxygen, douse them with salty brine, boiling alcohol. Radiate them with X-rays. Squish them with hundreds of atmospheres of pressure (6000 according to 'New Scientist', 31 October 1998, p. 26. From here.) Store them in a vacuum. Why not? If the treatment doesn't suit them, they roll themselves up in a little ball and go into stasis, like the colonists in sci-fi novels aboard their inter-galactic ships. A "tun", they call this, like a casket of ale. No ale in this tun, though; just a special sugar that takes the place of water in their cells.

Give them water and air, and they pop right back. From Carleton U., I learned that "Live tardigrades have been regenerated from dried moss kept in a museum for over 100 years!" It has been speculated that they could survive a trip in space.

And the little beastie I found the other day looked so small and fragile, I felt as if (knowing that I was not, but still -- he was so tiny!) I were treating him too roughly as I sucked him up into the eyedropper and dumped him on another plate. Deceptive, as well as tough.

I put him outside in the rain when I was finished with him. After all, he still may have another 80 years or more to live.

Image from Wikipedia.

Other resources: Animal Diversity Web , Carleton U., Microbial Life Educational Resources . Sandra Porter has more. And so does Christopher, as I noted earlier.
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Water bear! (repost)

This is a repost from my previous blog, from November, 20006, the first of 2 parts.

"What I really want to find is a water bear," I said this evening to Laurie. He said nothing, just rolled his eyes slightly. He already knows I'm a bit daft.

I had been demonstrating that daftness by describing, excitedly and in detail, the tiny insect I had discovered the day before. Some variety of something like a bristletail, I told him. And then went on to rave about water bears.

I had read about them, and had been looking in soil and soil debris samples off and on since last year, but with no luck.

Sleeping at night is not something I do very much of. I settled down around 11:00 or so to read the blogs until I was sleepy enough. And found this one. Sandra Porter was writing about Tardigrades. Which in common parlance, are water bears. On a rainy Sunday, she had gone out, collected a handful of moss, wet it (more) and squeezed it a bit, put the drippings under the microscope, and found water bears. I was jealous.

Ah, but she had given me a couple of good clues: how to look through the moss, and the size of the beasties. They can be from 1/2 mm to a bit over 1. Big enough to see with the naked eye, if the light is right. The books I have had never given me these important facts.

I didn't even finish reading. I went outside, in the rain and the dark, and collected a handful of moss and lichen. Brought it inside, watered it down, squeezed the drippings out, used an eye-dropper to put them on my usual examining plate (a white plastic lid). Brought out the magnifying lens and the hand microscope -- 40 to 60x -- and a needle for separating tiny fronds and started to search. Nothing. Nothing. More nothing. Moss, lichen, water, some mud. No water bears. I did find two earthworms, too small to be seen with the naked eye, no bigger than the water bears would be. My eyes were burning from the close work under a bright light; I closed them several times to rest them, then woke to find I had been sleeping with my eye propped on the microscope. Ouch!

Well, I had to tidy up and go to bed. I put away the microscope, bent just one more time to survey the straggly moss stems. Something moved. Something tiny and white, maybe about a millimetre long. When I bent over it with the lens, I could see it making its way across an open space between two mosses. It just had to be a water bear! I ran for the microscope, no longer sleepy.

It was a water bear. White. I carefully moved it to a black disposable salad plate from a fast-food joint. Turned the microscope on it again. Aha! Beautiful!

Sandra says they're cute. She's right.

So now, I'm going to bed, satisfied and sleepy again. Tomorrow: more about water bears and why they fascinate me. (Apart from the fact that I'm daft.)

Water bears!

Also known as tardigrades.

No, I didn't find any more.* Sadly.

But Christopher did; go on over to Catalogue of Organisms and see his First Tardigrades.

He says,

"And I have to say - tardigrades are just as adorable as I'd always imagined them to be. If not more so."

Yup.

*I posted about the one I found over on my previous blog. I will repost it here, shortly.
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That time of year again ...

... when everywhere you turn, there's a flower.

These are from last week. In descending order, according to size:


Magnolia. So sturdy-looking, yet so ephemeral; tomorrow they will be stained and dropping petals. For now, they stand upright on their bare branches, looking, at first glance, like ghostly flames.


White bleeding heart. This one is tough; these blooms have survived, so far, through rain, snow, and hail. And a spot of sunshine, too.


Epimedium. Rejoices in the English name of Horny Goatweed. Or Fairy Wings, which seems more appropriate.

It's a hardy evergreen perennial, often used as a ground cover. Mine is in a hanging pot, which brings the flowers right to eye level.


Lamium purpureum. Purple dead nettle. "Dead", because it doesn't sting like its (sort of) look-alike, the stinging nettle. The flowers barely peek out from under the soft blanket of the leaves. (Look at this full size to see the velvety texture.)

It's a common weed just above the high tide line and along the river bank. This one is from Boundary Bay. I just discovered from Wikipedia that it's edible. I'll have to try it.


And a really tiny weed. I've only seen it twice, both times in sunny, undisturbed spots. Dad had it in his yard; it forms a loosely-woven mat, delicate and easily ripped up, but quick to return. I don't know what it is.* Isn't it beautiful?

*Vasha says, in the comments, that it is Cymbalaria muralis, or Kenilworth ivy. Thanks, Vasha!
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Just becawse

Shameless moochers:

Habitat Restoration: Please Do Not Disturb
"See that? This land is MY land!"

And this is my feeding station. Why is it empty?

Over there, instead? On our way!

What? No peanuts? Shameful!

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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

*Added; I was lucky! On another beach, the crows .... Well, go see Simla's blog.
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Walking on water

On the first really warm day of the year, every last resident of the BC lower mainland goes to the beach. Taking the dog, if there is one.

We're not immune to the bug. We ended up on Crescent Beach and lined up to park with all the others. The water was full of white sails, the dog section of the beach with people tossing sticks. Out on Blackie Spit, wheelchairs followed the main path and kids flew kites on the beach itself. There were no birds but one lone seagull and a quarrel of crows in the scrub bush. The rest had made themselves scarce.

We escaped the crowds only by skirting the salt marsh.

The footpath threads between a flat mud surface hidden by a mix of saltgrass, pickleweed, and sea arrow-grass, with scatterings of sea lettuce and rockweed, left by occasional very high tides. The odd crab shell lies tangled in the grasses, even on the higher parts of the marsh.

On the shore of the slough, with our backs to the marsh.

A couple of large puddles attracted our attention, and we went to look at them, walking carefully so as not to sink in the mud.

The water was about an inch deep over a brownish scum, scattered with bits of weed. Not much to see, at least with the naked eye.

I was about to turn away when I saw a white blob on a blade of drowned grass.


I don't know what it is. White, somewhat bubbly, with a paler rim. Maybe a quarter inch lengthwise.

Tiny midges flew over the water surface. While I watched them, a water strider scooted out from the shadows.


Only one? That's all I saw at the time. But, zooming in, look:


One waterstrider, but a bunch of tiny, tiny water walkers. Baby striders? Or something different? What do you think?
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First Nations Reserve, Tsawwassen

The name, "Tsawwassen" is a Halkomelem word which means “looking towards the sea.” It fits; the Tsawwassen band occupies a strip along the southeast Delta shoreline, straddling the highway to the ferry landing. About 500 people live there, almost half of them non-native, many in a large, modern condominium at the foot of English Bluff, overlooking the quiet waters of the Strait of Georgia.

We followed the coastline down, crossing the reserve north to south. In the older part, we stopped at the church and its graveyard.

Church on the shore. With boat.

1879 1979
Centennial Heritage Site
Tsawwassen Indian Reserve

Established in 1878 for Delta's first settlers this 600 acre reserve was home to a thriving group of families who lived in community longhouses. They harpooned and trapped Fraser river salmon, small animals, and picked local berries for food.
The church of the Holy Ghost was built in 1904.

Side view of the church.


Small totem in the graveyard.


An even smaller "totem pole"; actually, a carved 4x4 stud. I'd never seen one like this before.


Both totems, for size comparison.


"William George, Aged 80, Died March, 1925." An iron cross, now tumbled on the grass.


On the balcony of a house. The longer you look at this, the more faces you see. Salmon, orca, owl? and human?

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Snails, striped, peeled and drilled

I'ts amazing how learning something new opens our eyes. A few days ago, Aydin Örstan, on Snail's Tales, wrote about peeled sea snails. I had seen these, but, as so often happens, didn't know what I was looking at; to me, they were just broken snails, pretty, but of no other interest.

I know better, now. Thanks to Aydin.

Boundary Bay beach has been taken over by millions (billions, trillions?) of Batilaria attramentaria, the invasive Japanese mud snail. Laurie photographed them a couple of years ago; mottled, brownish, sharply conical snails up to about 4 cm. long.

Photo from my Flickr page.

Another Batilaria attramentaria. Photo from NOAA photo library.

A couple of days ago, on the north end of the beach, I noticed that the snails were different; some were smaller, and elegant in stark black and white stripes, others wore some combination of the usual pattern with black and white. I took a few photos, to look at later.

Quite a variety.

I don't know if these are the same species, or a different one; Googling Batillaria images, I found several black and white ones, including a B. attramentaria. But these are smaller, besides. The large one I brought home is barely 2 cm.

At home, when I blew the photos up to full size, I noticed something else; peeling.

Aren't they pretty?

The snail at lower left is missing the outer shell on the bottom loop. The brown and white little one, second from the right, seems to be also missing a segment.


A few more. Three are "peeled".


And here's one that's drilled; see the hole?

Aydin explains that crabs peel back the fragile shells of small snails to get at the animal inside. I asked how big the snails have to get before they are safe; he wasn't sure. Ridges and bumps on the shell serve as a protection, but these Batillaria are fairly smooth. And small; I have seen a few about 4 cm. long, but most are closer to half that.

The drilled hole may have been made by a limpet, another snail, or any of a number of small sea creatures, using a raspy tongue, or "radula". (See Aydin's comment, below.)

It's a dog-eat-dog world out there.

Molted crab shell. Nice big pinchers for cracking snail shells.

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Toasted buns, lipstick and warty flowers

North of Boundary Bay beach, the sand gives way to salt marsh and mud flats. At the highest water level, a wide swath of rotting logs has collected at the foot of the dike. We took a closer look at the logs yesterday afternoon.


The blue hills in the distance are on the other side of the bay.

It looks barren, doesn't it? Up close, though, we find tiny "gardens" in crevices on top of the logs.


So many tiny treasures!


A true moss, possibly a Haircap moss. Under 2 inches tall.


Even smaller; cladonia lichen. Some variety of pixie cup, maybe.


Zooming 'way in, I can see that they are like little tubes, with the full-size ones flared out at the top. Compare them to these:


More like little goblets, and very warty. Two kinds of moss, yellow and green, make a ground cover.


And lipstick cladonia. Pucker up!

And doesn't this look like a toasted bun?


Some kind of polypore. This is the upper side. Silly me, I forgot to check the bottoms.

Tread softly.
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Gateway to ruin

A couple of days ago, I wondered about a luscious red shoot on the Gunderson Slough side hill. Hugh tells me it is probably Japanese knotweed.


As he says, "Yikes!" This is an attractive large perennial, bearing plumes of white flowers in season; it was imported to BC as a ornamental shrub. But it is not content to "bloom where it's planted"; it rapidly goes wild, sprouting as far as 7 metres from the original plant, and crowding out native vegetation, especially along riverbanks. It can send up new shoots even through pavement; it will clone itself from a piece of root an inch long; digging it out is more likely to spread it than to kill it.

Invasive, and noxious. One of its many names is "Hancock's curse." I don't know who Hancock is, but I know what he meant.

Sometimes I am filled with a feeling of despair, seeing our green land and its inhabitants disappear under our onslaught. We are an invasive species, like the knotweed.

In the Delta area, on my doorstep, the beaches are polluted, the wetlands where once waterfowl raised their young are now growing what my grandmother called "similarity houses," tall ones with barely space between for an adventuresome sparrow or two. Purple loosestrife clogs the waterways; malls the high ground. Even in the depths of Watershed Park, the roar of traffic drowns out bird calls.

And now we are threatened with the Gateway project; a system of highways going from Golden Ears in the east to Deltaport, 3 km out to sea, providing, so the politicians say,

"a balance of transit, road and bridge improvements, to keep traffic moving, our economy strong and our region liveable."

I don't believe them.

The transit they are thinking of is trucks and large container ships. Gas guzzlers. Major polluters. And a way of moving things around that we need to re-think, in this time of depleted oil reserves and a changing climate, given an already decreasing volume of shipping, and a current trend away from trucks back to railways.

Liveable? Just in Delta alone, the highway will wipe out Gunderson Slough, filling it in and paving it over. Then it travels along the shore of the river, clearcutting and terraforming the green hillside where now eagles stand guard. After the Alex Fraser bridge, it turns south to skirt Burns Bog, the largest domed peat bog on the west coast of North America, an important wildlife home, and a regulator of our lower mainland climate. The highway will cut the Bog off from its seaward opening.

Map (homemade) of the Delta section of Gateway. With birds. Click for full size.

Not content with that damage, the developers plan to cut across the rich farmland of lower Delta, diking, paving and eradicating bird breeding grounds as they go. They then move out into the water, over Roberts Bank, home to several pods of orcas, to double the size of the port there at present, even in the face of decreasing usage due to fuel costs.

A farmer's field, near Ladner, waiting for spring.

"Liveable"? I guess, if you don't mind pollution, if you can take your money and run, if you have never stood and marvelled at the creak of a sandhill crane's wings as he flew over your head, if you think green things, wet things, crawly things are "Ewwww!", if the purpose of land and sea, in your view, is to get across it rapidly, well, yes, then the project will make the Lower Mainland more liveable.

Not for us, though. Nor for the myriad small creatures we share the land with.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Update: Link to the next "Gateway" post, Deltaport, before Gateway.
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Here's looking at you

At my bedroom window,today:

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Colour comes to Gunderson Slough

We've photographed Gunderson Slough in December and in May; browns and greys in winter, then every shade of green in spring. This year, we caught it at the mid-point; still cold and bleak, but with the first hints of the bounty to come.


We followed a trail along the shore, leading behind the ancient, ramshackle storage sheds and rotting wharfs otherwise accessible only by water. It is a mere thread of a pathway, precariously perched on a bank between the shore and the railway, crossing creeklets and small gullies on assorted single-plank "bridges", often mended with whatever materials were on hand.

Flowers underfoot: two layers of ragged carpet reinforce rotting boards over a muddy spot.

New plank over walkway to final shed on path.

It's just a way to get to the parking lot, a necessity not considered by the first residents, one hundred and more years ago. No-one worries about tidying it up; the government plans to pave the banks and fill in the slough in a year or so, anyhow. But Mother Nature herself is busy with her flower garden here.

Skunk cabbage.

Bleeding heart, just opening up.

Another bleeding heart. Because they're beautiful.

Horsetail; look at those elegant borders on the sections of the dried stalks!

I don't know what this is. Do you?

And the inevitable spring salmonberry blossoms.

On the way back, we stopped at the cattail marsh to wait for a train to go by. Along the fence, chickadees and house finches came and went. I caught this courting pair:


Look closely, or click on this to see it full size: see the offering in his beak? Nesting material!


The redwing blackbirds were busy in the cattails. We got dozens of shots of this male, all in impossible positions. The female did pose, briefly, where we had a clear view. A distant view, over by the boathouses, but clear.

Last year's seed pods. Unidentified tree.

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Geezer

On Saturdays, Gunderson Slough is quiet and almost deserted.

This dog was standing guard at the door of a storage shed. When we stopped to look at old pilings, he hobbled arthritically down the road to check us out, squinting against the watery sunlight.

We passed muster, and he returned to his post.
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Mystery at Brunswick Point

Beyond Ladner, following River Road to the west, we always turn off on the bridge to Westham Island, and the Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary. This week, we sailed on past.

The road goes on about 3 km. and comes to a dead end, near the tip of Brunswick Point. Beyond this, the dike separates fertile farm land from a cattail and reed swamp and then the tide flats of Roberts Bank.


A sign informs us that this is protected land, bird nesting and feeding grounds; we are asked to refrain from disturbing them.

To our west, the remains of an old cannery, now reduced to rotting pilings, provided perches for a pair of cormorants.


We approached cautiously and quietly, but while we were still some distance away, they flew off. A party of buffleheads, cavorting near shore, turned tail and headed for the middle of the river. Unusual behaviour, for them; usually they ignore us.


Behind us, I heard voices. A couple of people, accompanied by a large dog, unleashed. That might have unsettled the birds if they had been nesting in the reeds, but off-shore? I didn't understand.

Further on, where the land curves south, assorted sandpipers and ducks fed in the shallow water. We kept our distance. The couple and dog went on ahead. Even after they rounded the point, I could mark their progress by the flight of birds on their sea-ward side.



What was making the birds so skittish? I remembered a blog post I had seen a week ago: Dog Walking Harms Wild Birds. A recent study of bird behaviour in the vicinity of dogs, even leashed dogs, showed that

"We found in field studies that dog-walking in bushland causes a 35 percent reduction in bird diversity -- the number of species -- and a 41 percent reduction in abundance -- the number of individual birds in an area," observed Banks. Not surprisingly, the researchers found that ground-nesting birds were most affected by dog-walking since these birds were usually absent altogether from areas where dogs were walked. They also found that habituation t othe presence of dogs played no role in decreasing the birds' flight.

But was that it? The dog walking down the dike?

There may have been another cause. I came across a few clues:


The leftovers of a feast. I found three separate piles among the grasses by the dike. Fox kill? Dog? Coyote? It wouldn't be an eagle, nor an owl; they carry their prey back home.

Eagle. Always present in this area. Shorebirds ignore them unless they are flying overhead.

But there were other signs of danger, as well.

Found at the side of the dike path.

I don't know guns. Laurie says this would be a shotgun. I saw two others, a green casing and a silvery-grey one.

Now we understood. On the beaches, a human on foot is relatively harmless, from a bird's point of view, so they let us approach to a few metres away. Out here on this "protected" but unwatched land, a human, even at a distance, is dangerous; he may have a gun. Or a dog and a gun.

We are angry. Outraged, rather. This should not be happening!

And I feel helpless.
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Too tired for words

Buffleheads, courting.

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Making one thing clear...

I think sea slugs are cool.

So are sea urchins.

And snails (land and sea), sand dollars, oysters and starfish, octopuses, clams. And sea cucumbers.

Sea snails, Crescent Beach

Although I haven't seen a sea cucumber since I was a kid. They used to hang out under our dock, and once we fished one out and watched the water pour out of it until it hung limp and slimy from my hands. I threw it back in, then. Weird, and wonderful.

I need to make this clarification, because I have been sadly misunderstood.

This morning, Jim Lemire posted the latest edition of Circus of the Spineless, including a link to my recent post, "Do beetles get hangovers?" It's a great edition, with plenty of goodies for all invertebrate lovers. (Should I say, rather, "lovers of invertebrates"?) But he took as a theme the current feud raging among the ScienceBloggers, over the question, "Which are better, echinoderms or molluscs?"

Craig, on Deep Sea News, lists the reasons for his choice (molluscs), beginning with this, the most important;

...the deuterstomes are basically a superphylum that encompasses the echinderms, urochordata, chordata, and hemichordata. What do these groups share in common? First, they are extremely uncool and to cheer for them makes you uncool.

Now Jim is pro-echinoderm. And anti-mollusc, in consequence. And he focussed the Circus of the Spineless accordingly.

Now, here comes where I got involved. The call went out for submissions to CotS; I sent mine in. And it got caught in Jim's spam filter. He sent out a second call, notifying us of the quirks of the filter, and orienting us as to his (a preference for echinoderms, a reluctance to accept mollusc posts), as well.

I sent in my submission again, but this time, thinking that maybe the spam filter has absorbed some of Jim's ideas, added a thankful, "Not a mollusc, fortunately."

And Jim, blinded, perhaps, by his rabid dislike of the "enemy", has jumped to the conclusion that I share it. He is mistaken. I am sitting solidly on the fence.

That said, I think the Cnidaria are cooler still. So there!

Orange-striped sea anemone, Diadumene lineata. Phylum Cnidaria.

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A bit of a chop

That's what we called it when I was a kid on Vancouver Island; a bit of a chop. More or less the usual, the everyday winter crossing of the channel. Just a little wind, a little chop, the odd whitecap here and there. Good weather for seabirds. And me; I loved the wind in my face, the slap-slap-slap of the bow on the wavelets, the salty dampness in the air.

I still do.


Crescent Beach, the last day of March. Out of the wind, with the sun on our backs, it was almost warm. Along the unprotected shore, the wind was brisk and nippy. My eyes were tearing up, and my lips stung from the cold. At least I'd thought to bring the tuque and gloves.


"Desolate," Laurie kept saying. "It looks desolate." It did. Flatness, greys and blues, no land features. Even the few people on the beach were bundled up and walking sedately, preserving energy.


A small boat went by, leaving a white wake. I would have liked to hitch a ride, just for the pleasure of the spray in my face.

The birds flying overhead (click for full size) followed an erratic path, looking as if they had been tossed into the sky by some ancient wind god. (Ehecatl, maybe?)


That's Laurie, getting his boots wet. Patches of off-white foam were scattered over the beach, looking like old, dirty soap suds, but in reality a rich, nutrient broth, loaded with elegant skeletons of phytoplankton.

Windrows of phytoplankton remains show that the sea off our coast is producing tons of food for other creatures in the food web.
From New Jersey Scuba Diver: scroll 'way down to "Sea Foam".

A bit off-shore, a pair of mallards idled in the shelter of a breakwater. Further out, buffleheads were fishing, visible only in flashes of black and white as they surfaced for air.


It was still early, but we were chilled through. We headed back home for steaming cups of tea.
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All-purpose support system

Seen on pilings or logs ...

Barnacles


Seagulls


Old buildings


Moss and lichens


Railroad tracks. With or without trains.


Oak leaves. But the log is gone.


Spray paint.


Moss and lichens, yellow, green and grey.

And cormorants, but there's no photo. Yet.
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